To the Faithful Departed
by Writegirl
Summary: saying goodbye is never easy


Title: To the Faithful Departed  
Pairing: Chuck/Moira and Chuck/Magneto  
Disclaimer: Nope, none of them are mine, just wanted to let them out for a little air, that's all.  
  
This story has some continuity with my others, so if you haven't, pleas read them!! ps. feedback is greatly appreciated and damn near worshiped, so please send some.  
love and stuff,  
apocl158@writeme.com  
  
  
I can still feel you.  
Don't ask me how, I simply can. Occasionally its something as light as a feather brush of wind, but its still there. I can almost hear your voice, telling me to stop sulking and move on, that you'd slap me if you could. Too just wait until we meet again, so you could give me a good piece of your mind.  
There were times when all I wanted was for you to disappear, usually when you were venting that's Scots temper on me for one reason or another. Now that you are gone, well and truly gone, there is nothing more that I want than to have you hitting me on the back of the head and telling me that I'm acting like a child.   
I cant imagine you as you were in those last moments, broken and bleeding, hanging tenaciously onto life. The same way you held on to everything. I remember the young woman that I'd almost ran down on the way to class all those years ago, thick glasses knocked so engagingly to the side, red hair flying. You looked so vulnerable then, almost like a child lost in adults clothing. But there was something there, an inner core of strength that I would have been able to see even without my abilities.  
Until that moment I had never believed in love at first sight.  
It took you a little longer to really know me. I remember that first date at Harry's ( I think my students would die if they knew that Harry's was a place where we used to have drinks.), one that quickly dissolved into a philosophical debate over the use of human testing for certain gene therapies. You were full of fire that night, brown eyes snapping with ire as I continued to disagree with you, if just to make that heat rise in your face and make you blush.  
But that was how you attacked life, wasn't it? There was nothing in the world that you couldn't argue down or disprove if you set your mind to it, nothing that could escape the grasp of your mind. You were the soul that I had been missing for so many years, years hidden in a world of books and secrets, where the only thing I had was myself and a strange power that was more a burden than anything else. You brought me out of the self imposed shell I had lived in, made me see the world as something beautiful, something worth living in.  
That first night I don't know who was more afraid, you or I. For some reason I couldn't hide from you, I couldn't shut away my emotions, separate myself from the situation. We were both too afraid for anything more than heavy petting, but the feeling of falling asleep with you in my arms made up for any awkwardness that we experienced.  
It was that night that I decided I couldn't live without you.  
Not something too certain for a twenty year old to assert was it? After that we were inseparable, where one was the other was not too far off. We talked about a future together, one that was full of children, of family, the quiet life that everyone dreams of, but very few people actually get to have.  
Then came the war.  
Suddenly you were gone, and I didn't know what to do with myself. It was your face that kept me alive through the combat, your face I thought about when I thought of home. Your laugh I heard when I couldn't stand the falling mortar shells. You were my lifeline, my link to the world outside of the carnage I was living.  
When I received your letter I thought my heart had died. I couldn't believe that you had thought so little of our love that you could so easily throw it away for another. For a moment I was too angry to do anything but look at the offensive piece of paper, digesting your words. Then it faded to an empty form of acceptance. Beyond everything else I wanted you to be happy, and if marrying him made you happy, I couldn't begrudge it to you. The next two years in the army were a small hell. Your nickname, 'Good Shepard', stuck, and soon I was working strictly search and rescue. For a time it was all I could think about, those men lost in a wilderness where one mistake would mean their lives, and possibly my own. There were times when all I wanted was to make that one mistake, but other lives always depended on mine, and I refused to sentence another to death for my own pain.  
Then I was discharged, and I didn't know where to go, what to do. Travel had always appealed to me, so I traveled, writing to you as often as I could, waiting with baited breath for you to write back. The first time I was almost certain that you wouldn't, then I received a note telling me how happy you were, that you were glad I was alright. After that, letters were all that kept me alive.  
Then I met Erik.  
I still cant tell you who was more surprised, you or I, when I faced up to our attraction. I remember writing to you, almost as if I was asking for you permission to be with someone else. I think I lost ten pounds waiting for you answer. You understood, something you were always capable of, and I was grateful. Despite the fact that a whole continent separated us, you held more sway over my life than anyone up to that point.  
Months went by, my relationship with Erik went south, and then I was writing to you, asking for advice, something, anything, to fill this new hole in myself. Unable to do anything else, I traveled to Muir Island, determined to see you. Four years was long enough to stay away, to let the flame between us die.  
When I found out you were in the hospital I thought my heart would leap out of my chest. I knew you were pregnant, and all I could think was that something had happened, that I was going to loose you. When I saw you lying there, pale and bruised, a fresh cast laying heavy on your leg, I didn't know what to do. Your baby was premature, but healthy. That was all I needed to know before I went looking for McTaggert.  
I knew where to find him, like my stepfather, all I had to do was look for the nearest pub. And there he was, sitting with his cronies, telling them about the lesson he had taught you. All I remember is this white hot rage filling me, until all I wanted was for him to cease to exist.  
It took four people to drag me off of him.  
I don't know if you even knew I was there. After that, I left, heading for Tibet, for some peace. So many things began to spiral out of control, too many to think about. Another year and I was back in the states, another woman on my arm, confined to a wheelchair. Even then, you were in my thoughts.  
Fate has always had a sense of humor in my opinion, and with us she certainly had her laughs, didn't she? For a second time we were thrown together, this time as colleagues, even though I could feel that passion still burning under the surface. And we let it burn there, kept it under control, except for that night we both had a little too much champagne. I still wonder what odd turn Fate would have lead us down if Hank hadn't found us making out like teenagers in my study.  
All these words, all these memories, and I still cant find what I want to say to you. There is really so much, so much that I didn't have the courage to say, that I wish I had said, because they may have made all the difference in our lives. I never told you I loved you, told you how much I loved that slightly off key singing that used to float through my home when you posed as my housekeeper all those years ago. Never told you that the haggis you made was only fit for compost, no matter how many times you would have hit me.  
In the end, in those last few moments, I would have followed you. But you knew that, which is why you pushed me away into the waiting arms of Jean and Cable. I was determined to not leave you, to for once face what you were going through with you. If Cable hadn't been there, I doubt Jean would have been able to keep me from following you.  
No matter what they tell me, you weren't supposed to die, not now, not like this. You were supposed to be an old woman, with grandchildren running around the island, talking about your wild days when you used to go skinny dipping in the loch. Telling them tales about their aunts and uncles across the ocean who could fly and know what they were thinking. If anything, I should have been the one to go first. I was the activist, the one who never sat and let things lie. I was the one who had escaped death more times than even I care to remember. So many times I turned death away, dodging it by the barest of margins.  
As silly and juvenile as it sounds I has always pictured you as invincible. The horrors of your marriage hadn't been enough to make you cower. Your son, the disease that was slowing killing you, nothing kept you down.  
Not even our child.  
I knew, knew that was why you broke our engagement, even though I didn't learn of it until years later. For a time I though it was little more than wishful thinking on both our parts, then it became something more. I only wish that you had told me about her, instead of telling me that you had found someone else, someone with whom you could live a life. By the time I knew the truth I had spent so much time raising the children of others that I was crushed. Crushed that you somehow thought I wasn't going to be a good father, crushed that you thought I hadn't wanted children. Crushed that you never told me, and further, that you never allowed me to mourn for the child I would never hold.  
And yet despite this heavy chain you wore it without so much as a stumble, as a whisper of complaint.   
Yes, I remember everything, one of the curses of telepathy. Yet in its own way it is a blessing, because it means that I'll never forget the smaller things that made me love you all the more, things that a normal human would be unable to remember. The larger things I loved you for, holding me when David died, calming me when I thought anger would get the better of me, comforting me after Erik died. But the small things, the way your hair had the slightest touch of gold to it in the sun, the small smirk that would cross your face when you finally solved a problem, the tiny sigh that escaped you after we made love, all those things I will carry with me forever.  
  
Charles Xavier looked up when he heard the light footfalls behind him. He was aware that the other mourners had gone indoors, fleeing the falling snow and cold. He had chosen to remain, to let out his own grief silently, away from others.   
"Sir?"  
Scott Summers, Xavier's oldest pupil, came to a stop a few feet behind the hover chair, watching his mentor. Beyond him, he could see the gravestone of Moira, see the delicately etched picture of her on the dark granite. It was what she had wanted, to be remembered as she had lived. The etching was of her profile, reading something that was just beyond the observers vision. A copy of a picture Charles had taken of her at Columbia. Below this he could see the slight waving of white roses, two dozen, that were laying in the snow, seeming to shiver in the cold.  
Charles didn't respond, he only sat, watching the snow slowly cover the flowers in front of him, cover his pain, his love, in a blanket as cold as that of death. In a way he found it more fitting this way, with all of nature seemingly humbled and saddened by her passing, shedding frozen tears for his beloved.  
"Charles, you cant follow her."  
For a moment he felt the overwhelming urge to laugh. He could, it would be simple. Almost unconsciously he ran his hands over the light scars on his wrists, reminders of a darker time in his life. It would be so easy, to open them again, to let what was left of his life to run out in a red tide. But he couldn't. He wouldn't. For what it was worth, he would continue to live his life.  
'Goodbye, my love,'  
  



End file.
